\section{Conclusions and Future Work}

%Future work for us includes increasing performance via better caching and several reliability updates.
%We will also look at long term leases, which will hopefully allow for many fewer remote procedure calls between the client and a MDS.
%If the number of these calls can be reduced, the viability of a Ringer network with clients separated via a low bandwidth connection from their MDS would be greatly increased.

%We will also look at optimizing the effectiveness of the similarity search.

In the near future, we are focused on testing Ringer's performance as a large distributed file system.
Ringer is not designed to provide high performance in a data center. 
Instead, we are interested showing Ringer's viability as a medium for global collaboration.

Another open question is how Ringer performs on a resource limited machine.
To answer this, we are porting both the client and MDS parts of Ringer to run on a 500 MHz ARM powered NAS box.

Also, what is the optimal connectedness for the MDS network?
More parents for each MDS mean a better chance of finding queried rnodes in searches but makes each search take longer.
We believe that two or three parents for each MDS will provide enough search paths for most queried rnodes to be found, and found relatively quickly.
A further refinement would entail dynamically updating the parent/child relationships so that a MDS hosting a ``hot" rnode has many paths leading to it, but ``cold" rnodes are only found via a few paths.

%In general, our hypothesis remains the same: Information exists in forms which are not handled well by the current usual suspects (the web and web-crawlers and traditional and P2P distributed file systems).

In conclusion, information exists in forms where it is either difficult to find or, once found, difficult to update in a coherent manor.
Our solution is to create a hybrid network where content is found via a collection of metadata servers but transfered directly between clients.
The resulting lack of any central authority ensures scalability, while unique file paths and a system of leases provide coherency. 
The specialized metadata servers in turn facilitate search. 

%We hope that Ringer will prove a reliable, efficient and scalable way to facilitate globally distributed collaboration. 

%Ringer's strength lies in its ability to cheaply combine many distinct LANs into a single logical volume, while scaling easily with both users and files. 
%Finally, Ringer was conceived from the ground up to allow files to be effortlessly added -- and just as effortlessly found again.

%\subsection{Appendix}

%Complete code, bug lists and some basic documentation for Ringer are available online at {\tt http://code.google.com/p/metaring}. 